The Granddaughter Who Paid Her Way

When I finished my certification as a home health aide, the plan was simple. I would live at home for a year, save what I could, and move into a place of my own once I had enough for a deposit and first and last month’s rent. My parents suggested I pay them something while I stayed there, and I agreed without arguing, because it seemed fair. Eight hundred dollars a month felt steep for a converted basement with a shower that only ran hot for six minutes, but I paid it without complaint, on the first of every month, because that was the deal, and I keep my word.

One year turned into two. Two turned into three. Every time I got close to having enough saved, something happened. My car needed a transmission. My father’s roof needed patching and somehow that came out of what I’d set aside, because family helps family, he said, and I believed him. I told myself the sacrifice was temporary, that I was building toward something, and I kept paying rent to two parents who never once thanked me for it, because in their eyes I wasn’t doing anything special. I was just doing what I was supposed to do.

Bethann’s situation looked nothing like mine, and it never had.

She married young, to a man named her friends warned her about and she married anyway, the way people do when they think love is going to be the thing that fixes another person. Two kids came fast, a boy and then a girl, and the marriage came apart not long after the second one was born, the way you could see it coming from a mile off if you were willing to look, which nobody in our family ever was. When it finally ended, Bethann moved back into our parents’ house with both children, into the bedroom that used to be hers growing up, and everyone agreed it was temporary, a soft place to land while she got back on her feet.